{"id":2868,"date":"2012-01-23T20:21:01","date_gmt":"2012-01-24T01:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2868"},"modified":"2012-01-24T23:49:15","modified_gmt":"2012-01-25T04:49:15","slug":"whether-to-re-up-on-marriage-fifty-words-at-everyman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2868","title":{"rendered":"Whether to Re-Up on Marriage – FIFTY WORDS at Everyman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theater Reviews Page<\/a> | Previous Theater Review<\/a> | Next Theater Review<\/a><\/p>\n

Whether to Re-Up on Marriage – FIFTY WORDS at Everyman<\/h2>\n

Published on BroadwayWorld.com January 23, 2012<\/p>\n

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Clinton Brandhagen and Megan Anderson<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When marriages go critical, as marriages will from time to time, the scenes and fights that embody the crisis will seldom be straightforward affairs.\u00a0 As playwright Michael Weller intelligently conveys in Fifty Words<\/em>, his recent off-Broadway success receiving its inaugural Baltimore production at Everyman Theatre, the emotions that will have led to the crisis were inevitably complicated things, and the crisis\u2019 unfolding will be consistent with those emotions.\u00a0 Except in the most empty marriages, no matter what the parties may have done to each other, there are still ties of love holding them together, however tenuously, in near-equipoise with the forces pushing them apart.<\/p>\n

In living through these crises, then, both forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal, must have a part.\u00a0 To the observer, it might seem laughably incoherent, but actually it is just the way things are at such moments.<\/p>\n

There are two ways a dramatist can approach this reality.\u00a0 He\/she can make of the complexity a dramatic structure unto itself \u2013 one in which there is no truth but the struggle between the parties, and in which each mode the parties have of relating to each other, whether it be hugging on the one hand or screaming and throwing things on the other, is just another form of struggle for mastery, no more distinct, at bottom, than thrust is from parry.\u00a0 That was Edward Albee\u2019s approach in Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Fifty Words,<\/em> though facially somewhat similar, actually takes the opposite tack, namely to treat seriously the contradictory emotions of the participants in the scene, to make the scene no more (or less) dreadful or dramatic than such a scene would be in real life, and to show the parties\u2019 incoherence and ambivalence for what it is: the natural result of the messy lives lived to bring them to such a moment.\u00a0 It is a canny approach, because few of us will attain much maturity without having lived through such scenes, and the shock of recognition will be considerable.<\/p>\n

The subject being a fairly universal experience, the two characters in this two-character play are Everymen of a sort \u2013 at least of the sort who inhabit New York brownstones and send their children to private schools.\u00a0 Adam (Clinton Brandhagen) is an architect, Jan (Megan Anderson) a former dancer turned freelance data-miner.\u00a0 They are likeable, even endearing, without being terribly distinct.\u00a0 Their nine-year-old son Greg, never seen onstage, may be slightly neurotic and\/or afflicted with mild ADD.[1] What ails Adam and Jan\u2019s marriage likewise is fairly typical: the inevitable fading of sexual novelty, the disappointments and pressures of their careers, the stresses of parenthood, and an affair Adam has been having which, not very coincidentally, chooses the night of their son\u2019s first out-of-home sleepover to become known.<\/p>\n

Even before Adam\u2019s affair tumbles out of the closet, we see the ambivalent way they treat each other, in love but not always loving, finding it difficult to connect.\u00a0 Once the mistress is acknowledged, however, the contradictions reach a fever pitch.\u00a0 She throws things that break; she gets a splinter in her foot; he helps get the splinter out; they make love; she orders him to leave the home, etc.\u00a0 He extols the way the mistress looks out for his feelings (as opposed to Jan, who he asserts does not), but then seems willing to promise whatever is necessary to revive the marriage \u2013 begging the question why, at least a little.<\/p>\n

Whether the marriage actually will be saved is not revealed by the fadeout, though the play ends on a hopeful note.\u00a0 But it is evident that if the two of them remain together, it will not be so much the saving of the extant marriage as effectively a third marriage for both of them, succeeding the hotly sexual early infatuation and the stage in which they built up a home and a family.<\/p>\n

Marriages, Weller seems to be saying, are actually multiple successive events, for which a couple must consciously re-up every few years.\u00a0 The title refers to the supposed number of words in Eskimo for snow (though I have also heard that this lexicographical multiplicity is an urban legend), and to a suggestion by one of the characters that there should be a similar number of terms for love (perhaps one for each iteration of a marriage).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve not seen the various productions of Fifty Words<\/em> (New York, Toronto, and Chicago, at least), but it seems that the play has undergone some changes since its 2008 premiere.\u00a0 Everyman gives it a solid rendering with two veteran company members doing the honors in workmanlike fashion, fully and convincingly inhabiting two average professional-class New Yorkers living through a garden-variety crisis.\u00a0 You believe in these characters from the outset, without finding either of them very remarkable, which I think is exactly right for this play.\u00a0 Director Donald Hicken keeps the action humming and the emotions real.\u00a0 And the set by Timothy Mackabee is a marvel, a straight shot through the fuselage of a brownstone with everything from a fridge to board games on display.<\/p>\n

______________<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0 One reader has suggested that I missed cues that the son’s condition is actually Asperger’s.\u00a0 Could be; that is, it could be that we’re meant to think that.\u00a0 What I read into it was that the parents were being bombarded with a lot of worrisome but ambiguous information of the sort that not always, but usually signifies merely that a child is having a rough patch, and, at worst, is probably at the benign end of the spectrum of horribles.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn except for photograph<\/p>\n

Theater Reviews Page<\/a> | Previous Theater Review<\/a> | Next Theater Review<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As playwright Michael Weller intelligently conveys, except in the most empty marriages, no matter what the parties may have done to each other, there are still ties of love holding them together. In living through these crises, then, both forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal, must have a part. To the observer, it might seem laughably incoherent, but actually it is just the way things are at such moments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theater-reviews-and-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2868"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2897,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions\/2897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}